How Much Do Aerospace Internships Pay? A 2026 Salary Breakdown

I run a job board that lists internships in aerospace, defense and deep tech, which means I read an unreasonable number of internship postings every week and have developed opinions about all of them. The question I get asked more than any other is how much these roles actually pay, and the honest answer is that a single average number is close to useless here, because the same industry that pays a software intern fifty dollars an hour will pay a mechanical intern half of that in a different building on the same campus.

So instead of an average, here is what the reported numbers actually look like in 2026, where they come from, and why the gap between the top and the bottom of the range is so much wider than most students expect.

The short answer

Most paid aerospace and defense internships in the United States land somewhere between $20 and $50 an hour. Anything below that range is usually a research stipend rather than an hourly wage, and anything above it is usually a software role at a company that is competing with big tech for the same candidates rather than with other aerospace companies.

For context, the National Association of Colleges and Employers put the average hourly wage for interns at the bachelor's level at $23.35 in its 2026 survey. Aerospace and defense employers generally sit above that line, though not by as much as the SpaceX and Anduril numbers floating around Reddit would suggest.

Reported intern pay at aerospace, space and defense employers

These are individual reported data points rather than official pay bands, so treat them as evidence rather than as a promise of what your offer will look like. Most come from Levels.fyi, which collects self reported internship offers with the season and location attached, and a few come from job postings where the employer published a range because state pay transparency law required it.

The NASA number deserves its own paragraph

NASA pays its interns through a stipend rather than an hourly wage, and the agency confirmed that summer 2026 rates were held flat from summer 2025. The summer session runs ten weeks at forty hours a week, so the undergraduate stipend of $8,200 works out to about $20.50 an hour and the graduate stipend of $9,900 comes to roughly $24.75 an hour before you account for the fact that interns arrange and pay for their own housing near centres like JPL in Pasadena and Ames in Mountain View, where that arrangement gets expensive very quickly.

None of which is an argument against taking it. A NASA internship on your resume opens doors that a marginally better paid role at a subcontractor will not, and the Pathways programme in particular functions as a direct route into federal civil service employment. It is simply worth going in with an accurate picture of what will be left over in August.

Why the spread is so wide

Four things explain most of the variation, and once you can see them you can predict roughly what a posting will pay before you open it.

The first is discipline. Software interns are paid more than hardware interns almost everywhere, not because the work matters more but because a company hiring a software intern is bidding against Meta and Stripe for that person, while a company hiring a propulsion intern is bidding against three other rocket companies who all have the same problem. Anduril paying fifty dollars an hour in Costa Mesa for software and twenty six in Mississippi for mechanical is the clearest illustration of this in the whole dataset.

The second is degree level. Nearly every large employer runs a published ladder that steps up from sophomore to junior to senior to master's to PhD, and the difference between the bottom and the top rung is frequently ten dollars an hour or more. Northrop's own posting shows this, with bachelor's candidates starting at $20.50 and master's candidates starting around $29.

The third is capital structure, which sounds like a strange thing to bring into a conversation about internships but explains a great deal. Companies burning venture money to hit a launch cadence pay aggressively for talent because their constraint is engineering throughput. Primes working on cost plus government contracts have their labour rates scrutinised by contracting officers and move much more slowly. This is why a Series D space startup and a hundred year old prime can advertise similar roles at meaningfully different rates.

The fourth is simply geography and the pay transparency laws that come with it. Colorado, California, Washington and New York all require published ranges, which is why the most reliable numbers in the table above happen to come from postings in those states rather than from anywhere else.

Be sceptical of the aggregator estimates

While pulling this together I noticed something worth flagging. Glassdoor currently reports an estimated average intern salary of roughly $35 an hour, or somewhere around $72,000 to $73,000 annualised, for SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, NASA and Rocket Lab. The figures are near identical across all six, differing by a few hundred dollars.

That is not six companies converging on the same pay philosophy. That is a statistical model filling gaps with a national estimate for the job title "Intern" and attaching a company name to it. ZipRecruiter has the opposite problem in the other direction, showing figures near the federal minimum wage for roles that plainly pay double that. Neither number is a lie exactly, but neither is a data point either, and if you walk into a recruiter conversation quoting one of them you will not sound like you did your research.

The numbers worth trusting are published bands in job postings, self reported offers where the person specified season, location and degree level, and figures the employer states directly.

What the housing stipend is actually worth

A number of the offers in the table came with housing support, and this changes the calculation more than the hourly rate usually does. A summer at $30 an hour with $3,000 toward housing in El Segundo will leave you with more money in September than a summer at $34 an hour with nothing, because a room within a reasonable commute of the South Bay will take most of a thousand dollars a month off you and probably more.

So when you compare two offers, work out what you keep rather than what you earn. Ask specifically whether housing is a stipend, a reimbursement or corporate housing that the company arranges, because those three things are very different and recruiters use the words loosely. Ask whether relocation is a lump sum and whether it is taxed. Ask whether the site runs a compressed schedule, since a 9/80 arrangement gives you every other Friday off without changing your pay at all, which is a real benefit that never appears in any salary comparison.

The part that actually matters more than the hourly rate

NACE reported that intern to full time conversion reached 63.1% in its 2026 survey, the highest figure in five years. That number is the whole reason to think carefully about where you spend a summer.

An internship in this industry is functionally an option on a graduate offer, and the strike price of that option is what the company pays new engineers rather than what it pays interns. Three dollars an hour across a twelve week summer is about $1,400 before tax. The difference between converting into a role at a company that is growing quickly and converting into one that is not will be worth many multiples of that within two years, and the difference between having a clearance sponsored and not having one is worth more still.

That is not an argument for accepting bad pay. It is an argument for not optimising a twelve week decision on the smallest variable available to you.

What to do with all of this

If you are comparing offers right now, the practical version is short. Find out the degree level band for the site rather than the company, since the same employer pays differently in Huntsville and Redondo Beach. Confirm the housing arrangement in writing before you sign. Ask directly what the conversion rate was for last year's cohort on that specific team, because someone always knows and most recruiters will tell you.

And if you are still looking, our board is where I put everything I find, sorted by discipline and with the pay range shown wherever the employer published one. You can browse aerospace and space internships, defence and national security roles, and deep tech internships without wading through the general listings that clog up the big job sites.

Frequently asked questions

How much do aerospace engineering interns make an hour?

Most aerospace engineering interns in the United States earn between $22 and $38 an hour, with the figure depending mainly on degree level and location. Reported offers at Blue Origin and Relativity Space sit around $38 an hour, while published bands at Northrop Grumman start at $20.50 for bachelor's candidates.

Do SpaceX interns get paid?

Yes. Reported SpaceX internship offers cluster around $30 an hour, and several have included additional support of roughly $3,000 toward housing and $500 toward transportation for the season.

Does NASA pay its interns?

Most NASA OSTEM interns receive a stipend rather than an hourly wage. For summer 2026 the agency held rates flat at $8,200 for undergraduate interns and $9,900 for graduate interns across a ten week session, and interns are responsible for their own housing and travel.

Which aerospace or defense company pays interns the most?

Among reported offers, Anduril sits at the top for software engineering roles at around $50 an hour, with Lockheed Martin's software internships in Dallas reported at $40. Palantir, which sits adjacent to the sector rather than inside it, has reported software internship pay above $60 an hour.

Are aerospace internships ever unpaid?

Rarely at the larger employers, who almost all state that every internship is paid. Unpaid or lightly paid positions are more common at university affiliated labs, research consortia and very early stage startups, and a small number of Space Grant academic year placements pay a modest semester stipend instead of a wage.

Do you need a security clearance to intern in defense?

You usually do not need one on day one, but many defence internships require United States citizenship and the ability to obtain a clearance, and some programmes sponsor the investigation during the internship itself. A sponsored clearance is one of the most valuable things you can leave a summer with, since it materially changes what you are worth to employers afterwards.

Do aerospace internships include housing?

Some do and some do not, and this varies by site rather than by company. Blue Origin has provided corporate housing on several reported offers, Anduril has included a monthly housing allowance at some locations, and NASA provides nothing. Always confirm before you accept.

Pay figures in this article come from self reported internship offers collected by Levels.fyi, published pay bands in employer job postings, NASA's stated 2026 OSTEM stipend rates, and the 2026 NACE Internship and Co-op Survey. Individual offers vary by site, degree level and season.